Avatar is a hybrid sci-fi, hero-going-native film with audacious, blazing, state of the art CGI and 3-D effects. Director James Cameron has created a film with the earmarks of the future all over it. Constantly upping the eye-candy currency, the story, at times, becomes a non-issue. Much like the action movies of decades past, stuff gets blown up and the viewer literally wants to reach out and touch what is going on during certain scenes. After the film’s CGI brilliance becomes a normality and the viewer adjust to it, their attention diverts to the meat of the movie, the story. Unfortunately for Avatar, after gorging themselves on its visuals, the viewer may want a story equally as impressive. They will not find it with Avatar. In Avatar’s defense, there are not many films whose storylines are up to the task of matching Avatar’s visuals. In that respect, Avatar shoots itself in the foot, bearing its own weight and floundering when it comes time for exposition.

Adding to the chorus of semi-harmonious diatribes about how Avatar is Dances with Wolves-lite, the viewer has seen the characters realized in Avatar far better before. The characters in Avatar are generic representations of many of the characters found within the territories of Dances with Wolves’ but without depth. They are as interchangeable as the characters in Event Horizon.

Lieutenant John J. Dunbar in Dances with Wolves is injured at the beginning of the film while Corporal Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) in Avatar comes injured from a previous battle. Lt. Dunbar goes off to the frontier, a land he has heard about. Cpl. Sully does the same. Lt. Dunbar encounters the natives of that area, the Lakota, and begins learning their ways and customs. Cpl. Sully does the same with the Na ‘vi on Pandora. Lt. Dunbar becomes disgruntled with his own kind and chooses to side with and lives with the natives. Cpl. Sully does so as well expect in Dances with Wolves, its far more compelling, sad, and regrettable. The viewer feels sorry for what Lt. Dunbar is put through, for both the unintentional malfeasance and the outright violence bestowed upon him. In Avatar, the viewer is mostly ambivalent to what happens to Cpl. Sully because the violence mostly happens to his avatar, not him. If the viewer had seen Cpl. Sully receive the injury that paralyzed him as they did to Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July, this might not have been the case.

The action and intensity of Avatar is nowhere near as high as in Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Abyss or Aliens. There is that Cameron build up but the pay-off is nowhere near as high as in the aforementioned films. On the surface, the PG-13 rating cultivated by and bestowed upon Avatar could be blamed but that is not the case because The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was highly intense and had the same rating (I still don’t know how that finger biting off scene on Mount Doom got by the ratings board). Cameron intentional pulled his punches. Whether this was for economic reasons, there was no reason to “go there” or the story didn’t call for droplets of plasma and bloodshed are questions and quandaries only Cameron can answer. From what I have read, however, it was to maintain the PG-13 rating.

Avatar is sorely missing the grit of Aliens, that film’s multifaceted characters, and its singular depth. Characters change in a hollow, predictable ways in Avatar whereas in Aliens, the characters changed in unpredictable ways, case and point: Ellen Ripley and Private William Hudson.

The “bad guy” in Avatar, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), is not inherently evil, he is a soldier given a commission and will do what it takes to carry it out. He couldn’t care less about anything outside the realm of that. Like Gunnery Sergeant Asher “Sarge” Mahonin said in Bartkowiak’s Doom when asked about seeing something negative outside the scope of his mission: “I didn’t see shit. I don’t get paid to see shit.” Col. Quaritch has no hidden agenda. He doesn’t even hate the creatures that disfigured the side of his head. It would be a trite Moby Dick cliché if he did but there is also nothing to his character beyond his actions. In this he is saved to a degree because he always acts, he never asks someone else to do something when he is capable of doing it himself. At one point he goes outside in the lethal environment, holds his breathe, and uses his machine gun then his handgun on escaping traitors. This kind of single-minded, army-of-one mentality was great to see but it was never built upon personality-wise. It was like watching a slightly better written and “AMP”ed up version of Nero from Abram’s Star Trek all over again. Col. Quaritch is a means to an end, a story element but one with a pulse, a could-have-been.

Battle for Terra, involving situational similarities to Avatar, possesses the original storyline this CGI spectacle deserved to and should have had. In almost every way Avatar is hackneyed, Battle for Terra is not. Where humans come to Pandora for greed, humans come to Planet Terra for the survival of the species. Because of this, the dynamics and imperatives in Battle for Terra are escalated, the stakes are higher. When amoral decisions are made by the humans, they are made by trapped, 7th Generation submariners that have only known a decaying metallic ship all their lives, one that is rapidly losing the ability to sustain human life. It’s Terra or death. On Pandora, it is we get paid or we go home empty handed for all of our deforestation efforts.

James Cameron’s Avatar is a ballistic, 3-D eye candy extravaganza whose story quality could not possibly match its visuals. It starts and ends with Corporal Jake Sully. Cameron was in too big of a hurry to get him to Pandora and didn’t spend enough time on him like he did with Ripley before taking her back to LV-426, Queen Bitch of the Galaxy before she dove down to “her” rig or Rose before that boat, what’s-its-name, sank. Avatar is a film that, if stripped of its visuals, would be like Robocop stripped of its metal: chunks of common, base organic elements with no backbone. This reality is present because of Avatar’s inherent premise: the strong taking from the weak, an ancient story, so ancient in fact that we have seen it innumerable times before.

==Written by Reginald Williams==

==From: Film-Book dot Com==

"You've never experienced anything like it," gushed the LA Times about "Avatar," James Cameron's motion-capture extravaganza. And if you aren't a Cameron connoisseur or an avid gamer, you might put all stock in the novelty of cutting-edge illusion and feel just as effusive. I may not have experienced the marvels of "Avatar" bundled together into one parcel until now, or its "game-changing" 3D effects, but I still felt like I'd been down this road before. Not to say I wasn't left breathless by the film's look or thrilled by its outstanding action sequences; if I checked my watch once or twice, it wasn't during the climactic battle between airships and dragon-mounted archers, which swept me up into a gleeful place six feet above my chair. "Avatar" is for the eyes and breast. It's achingly beautiful, a 70mm version of "World of Warcraft's" loveliest zone, with its humid, violet luminescence, its drifting tendrils, its spots of blood-red, and its alien fungal forms. But it's not an original. It's a fantasy realm we've seen as far back as American McGee's "Alice," and Cameron shouldn't be faulted for grasping that realm's allure and reproducing it in its finest form to date. There's no reason why the visual feast of better video game art direction shouldn't be adapted for the multiplex. It's evident that Cameron himself feels this way. He suggests as much in the movie's title and premise.

"Avatar" is set in the future, after humans have de-greened the Earth and mastered intergalactic flight. Big industry has enlisted scientists and the US military to help them colonize Pandora and extract its precious ore. The new planet presents an old complication, however: the biggest deposit lies under territory inhabited by a tribe of indigenous Na'vi (a half-anagramic play on native), whose size, prowess and near-indestructible bones hinder the humans' quest. Enter Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), whose Avatar program is expected to level the playing field by inserting the consciousness of human operatives into bodies similar to those of the locals. Strong, feline, and ten feet tall, the avatars take getting used to, but they're perfectly adapted to Pandora's environment. Thrust into one of these bodies is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic marine who's assigned the avatar genetically designed for a dead brother. He makes half-hearted statements about accepting the mission in exchange for spinal surgery, but we glean his real motive; the big blue bodies are the stuff of human dreams. Sully yearns to do what many of us wish we can: experience unlimited physical intelligence in a form just shy of immortal.

Some walk away from "Avatar" exhilarated by its action, realm and special effects. Others are left disappointed by its clichés, its eye-rolling dialogue and its amateur-hour narrative. I get where both types of viewer are coming from, because I experienced both sensations in equal measure. This review is neither a rave nor a pan, but a dig-in-my-heels demand for better. I can forgive a film a lot if the visuals are fat enough, but I expected more from a Cameron SF/action movie, especially one that's been gestating for over a decade. The man who (along with John McTiernan) defined the American action movie in the 80s and 90s needs to bring it to the next level in 2009. Instead we're handed stale devices that worked in "Terminator," 'T2,' "Aliens" and "The Abyss," but which have lost impact after years of mimicry: the despotic military official from "The Abyss" and the oily corporate henchman from "Aliens"; a battle-royal in a steel monkey-suit (Ripley's "Aliens" showdown is reversed, with the baddie in the suit and the hero in the alien's form); the female genius whose creation goes awry (Grace is a ringer for Lindsey in "The Abyss") and the plucky female pilot who navigates like a dream but still ends up dead; Sigourney freaking Weaver making her entrance out of a cryonic sleeping pod (Cameron's only moment of self-awareness falls flat); and the Destruction of the Big Thing—not an ocean liner or submarine mining rig this time, but a gigantic tree that relies on the same sound-effect as the Titanic and the rig when it keels. Cameron even recycles dialogue. We hear double when Grace calls Colonel Quaritch "Ranger Rick" as she scolds him about ethics (Lindsey calls Lt. Coffey "Roger Ramjet" during the same set-up in "The Abyss"). We expect a degree of consistency from our directors, but Cameron uses old inventions like a crutch that can't leverage him out of a serious narrative rut. There's a difference between a signature and a do-over, and Cameron's self-imitation is parodic. There's just too much of it.

What little wonder exists in "Avatar"—besides the larger wonder of its visual effects—resides in its mythology. Nothing much is new here, but that's okay when you're dealing in myth; that's how these frameworks function. Still, it takes a special kind of hack to turn a venerable archetype (Sully is yet another Chosen One) into a blundering cliché that struggles to win hearts in our post-colonial era. Pandora's neural network, which connects goddess and ancestor to animal and vegetable, is rendered so beautifully that Cameron's patronizing, mangled politics can almost be forgiven. The Na'vi bind themselves to their mounts with braids that turn out to be external auxiliary spinal columns of a sort (powerful ones that appeal to the chair-bound Sully). This bond between life forms is supposed to celebrate Mother Earth philosophies, but Cameron gaffs his political correctness when Sully uses colonial words like "You're mine!" when he claims his mount. The film is riddled with these missteps that constantly undermine what little invention exists onscreen. Cameron is being praised for his attention to detail (Pandora's world, the Na'vi tongue), but his focus falls short where it counts. He neglects details of character, conversation and theme, the latter of which is all over the place, poxed by lazy contradiction, knocked aside in the filmmakers' haste to hop us up on their eye-candy. Their "game-changing" line rings hollow if the meat remains the same or—worse—falls short of Cameron's earlier dedication to story and character, which made Sarah Connor and Bud Brigman substantial enough.

I haven't detailed the project's whiz-bang technology or its problematic politics, since both these subjects have been treated ad nauseam elsewhere (a little Google-fu will do you, if you're so inclined). I went into "Avatar" as a fan of Cameron's SF/action films, expectations taut, so that's the fairest way to approach this review. That inner fan was let down. The gamer in me was also intrigued and somewhat more mollified—and to bring up video games in the same breath as "Avatar" is no insult. In fact, the concept of games and their place in our culture is one of the few motifs Cameron nails, and it partially salvaged the film for me. The imagery of places that delight me in another "life" (the oozy purples of WoW's Zangarmarsh and the floating mountains-with-waterfalls of Nagrand) connect not accidentally to the movie's concept. Disabled Sully represents earthbound us, and his obsession with Pandora—his eagerness to return to the fantastic blue body of his avatar each day—has all the hallmarks of gamer addiction. Grace chides him for neglecting to eat and bathe; Sully's too eager to earn rep with the Na'vi and graduate from mount to flying mount to epic flying mount (WoW players spot the pattern and know his satisfaction). It's deliberate. We're supposed to think of video games when we hear the title of Cameron's movie and revel in Sully's thrills. But those of us who need narrative substance in our films to make up for the thinness of animated faces onscreen—who can't get past the lack of texture that CGI continues to present—feel shortchanged. Between the gut-churning speeches, the conventional soundtrack, the ham-fisted anti-oil, anti-imperialism and anti-Iraq messaging, and the recycled everything, there's not much sophistication here, and not much beyond the 3D effects or the realm itself to earn the finicky viewer's kudos.

==Written by Ranylt Richildis==

==From: In Review Online (www.inreviewonline.com)==

With The Terminator, its sequel T2: Judgement Day, The Abyss, and Aliens, James Cameron solidified himself as one of the all-time great directors. He's still remembered for those movies and rightly so. But in the late '90s came a juggernaut of a movie, both financially and critically — the historical romantic blockbuster, Titanic. It made $1.8 billion at the worldwide box office and won 11 out of its 14 Oscar nominations.

Since then, Cameron hasn't directed a feature film (he's mostly been making documentaries on the depths of the sea). However, before he even made Titanic, Cameron had a vision for a film set on another world and filled with amazing creatures. That movie was Avatar. At the time the technology didn't exist to bring his ideas to life, and so in the back of his mind it stayed for a decade and half.

However, as the end of the first decade of the 21st century approached, the technology had finally caught up with Cameron, and he was able to make his vision come true. The hype leading up to Avatar was monumental, with proclamations of it being the greatest innovation in filmmaking since celluloid. That alone is a lot to live up to, and I'm happy to report it does.

First, the plot: Sam Worthington (Terminator Salvation) plays Jake Sully, a paraplegic ex-Marine who one day gets the opportunity to experience living on another planet through the use of a genetically modified body known as an Avatar. The planet he'll be going to is Pandora, a world filled with an abundance of diverse and unknown creatures, including an indigenous race called the Na'Vi. Jake's mission is to learn the Na'Vis' ways of life and feed the info back to the humans off-planet. But once there, Jake starts to see life from the perspective of the Na'Vi and begins to disagree with the humans' prerogative.

This isn't "just another movie," one that you should maybe catch on the odd day off. This is an event, one that needs to be experienced on the big screen, in 3D, the way it was meant to be. Just simply looking at what's on screen for the whole 161 minutes (a runtime which absolutely flies by) is jaw-dropping, from the look of the Na'Vi themselves (who, out of context, look strange, but are completely acceptable as characters within the movie) to the wildlife that makes up the planet.

That's perhaps the biggest joy of Avatar: just experiencing this "other world" that Cameron has created. This film has as a selling point the fact that it's not a sequel, a prequel, a spin-off or based off of any sort of source material (although Cameron is no doubt been influenced by sci-fi material of all kinds). This is an original work, from the mind of the man who brought us greats like Aliens and Terminator 2. The scenes, for example, which involve the camera swooping through the jungle, following floating white "insects," or watching the Na'Vi gracefully and assuredly make their way through the jungle to practice climbing are all gorgeous to look at. And what makes them so are not just the vibrant colours or sharp visuals, but the way in which everything on screen has been carefully mapped out and detailed. You feel as if the camera were to suddenly swing round and zoom in you'd see every little pattern on the nearest tree or insect's wing.

The casting of Worthington in the lead role just solidifies him as the leading man of the minute. Having already starred in the blockbuster Terminator Salvation (coincidentally, the fourth instalment in a franchise that Cameron kicked off in the mid-'80s), and the upcoming Clash of the Titans, I think it's safe to say this guy is going places. He's got a certain everyman presence about him that makes him relatable and someone you can really root for. In the fourth Terminator he was able to make a half-man, half-machine feel totally empathetic, and here, even in his Avatar body (which weirdly looks like him) he's able to draw so much humanity from it all. He's doing very well for himself and I wish him nothing but continued success.

Surrounding him is an array of great actors and there isn't a weak link in the chain: Ripley herself, Sigourney Weaver, plays the tree-hugging scientist who sympathizes with the Na'Vi; Giovanni Ribisi plays the money/power-hungry head of the operation to invade Pandora; and Stephen Lang is brilliant as the "shoot first, think later" Colonel Quaritch, a man who would love nothing more than to kill every one of the Na'Vi ("they are very hard to kill").

But much like Cameron's Titanic or Terminator 2, one of the major highlights of Avatar are the visual effects. And when the hype purported it was a step forward in special effects technology that wasn't an overstatement — this really is revolutionary stuff that Cameron has utilized here, and in fact the man himself even developed a new camera to get exactly what he wanted up there on the screen. The 3D here is used perfectly, enhancing the overall experience of the movie as opposed to just being there to have things jump out of the screen at you just for the sake of it, as most 3D movies do (Beowulf, Coraline, My Bloody Valentine, on and on).

Amazingly, as much as the movie is about the visuals, Cameron still manages to keep things grounded and even, at times, genuinely emotional. From the outside looking in, the blue Na'Vi creatures should be as alien to us as their appearance, but Cameron makes them as much human as the human characters themselves (often even more so). Zoe Saldana (who played the new Uhura in this summer's excellent Star Trek reboot) stands out in particular as the female Na'Vi who Jake falls for whilst in his Avatar body.

However, emotionality aside, it wouldn't be a James Cameron movie without several big action set pieces. One big sequence at the end comes particularly to mind — awe-inspiring doesn't even begin to cover it. There's as much detail in that one scene — bullets flying everywhere, ships exploding, arrows shooting, several hundred characters on screen at any one time — than I've ever seen in a movie.

Of course, all of this is possible because of the film's mammoth budget of approximately $300 million ($500 million has even been rumoured, if you include promotional budgets and so forth), which would make it the most expensive movie ever made. The question of whether it's worth the money or not is debatable, but the question of whether it will make its money back at the box office has a much clearer answer: yes. Although I don't think it will have the all-time record-breaking success of Titanic (it just doesn't have as much of a universal appeal as that did, particularly not to most female audiences), I have no doubt that people will be going out in droves to experience it on the big screen.

If I had to stretch to anything I thought was a fault of this movie, it would maybe be the story. It's not particularly original (someone aptly described it as "Dances With Wolves a few centuries into the future") and it's sometime easy to see where things are going. Also, as mentioned, a few of the human characters are a little bit two-dimensional. But those are nitpicks on my part, and everything else was so great they were easy to forgive and overlook.

Needless to say I absolutely loved this movie, not just because of spectacular set pieces and overall epic nature, but the visuals (and the technology employed to achieve them) are absolutely stunning. It's one of those movies that if you paused it at any point, you'd have an image ready to be framed and hung up on the wall. This — the return of James Cameron after 12 years away from the director's chair — is modern day filmmaking at its biggest, boldest, and most visually stunning.

Much like the blockbuster juggernaut of last year that was The Dark Knight, Avatar had an immeasurable amount of hype built up around it, but I'm glad to say it lives up to it. Mr. Cameron has delivered; he's still very much got it.

==Written by Ross Miller==

==From: Movie World (www.movie-world.moonfruit.com)==

Avatar the Last Airbender: Book 3, Volume 1 is a slightly unusual suite of episodes in the Avatar canon, as the majority of programs are even more comical than usual. Not that the five shows included on this disc lack seriousness: the long-running series now finds young Aang (the once and future avatar destined to reunite the world's four estranged nations) and his traveling companions behind enemy lines in the Fire Nation, disguised as colonists. In "Awakening," Aang arises--with a surprising headful of dark hair--from several weeks of unconsciousness (due to the injuries he sustained during a battle for Ba Sing Se) aboard a captured Fire Nation warship. Though he finds old friends Sokka, Toph, and Katara nearby, all urging him not to take matters in his own hands, Aang ultimately feels compelled to go head-to-head with the Fire Lord before he is ready. The result forces Aang and the others to remain incognito, setting up subsequent episodes in which the heroes are forced to lay low and find something else to do with their time besides fight adversaries. In "The Headband," Aang enrolls in a Fire Nation school, where his eyes are opened to such ordinary experiences as dealing with a campus bully and getting a hard time from strict teachers. In "The Painted Lady," Aang, Sokka, Katara, and Toph visit an impoverished fishing village and have to repress their typical instinct to help lest they be recognized as outsiders. (An alternative is found.) "Sokka's Master," in some ways the most enjoyable episode here, finds Sokka feeling useless because he doesn't possess powers similar to his mates. His solution: talk a master swordsman into taking him on as an apprentice. Finally, the most unexpected story in this collection is "The Beach," in which Prince Zuko, Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee--all of whom are back in the Fire Nation, too--take an awkward holiday but end up learning a lot about one another.

Meanwhile, Zuko--following his extended banishment from the Fire Nation--discovers that his father welcoming again, but only because his manipulative sister, Princess Azula, has falsely told everyone that Zuko killed Aang. Fearing that his father will disown him again, Zuko chooses not to tell the truth and works on having Aang quietly assassinated. Where Zuko had been more of a complete human being during his exile, he's back to being a monster again, going so far as to keep his dutiful uncle, Iroh, in a dark, dank prison. --Tom Keogh